Tweeting? Odds Are You Live in a City

ALEX MINDLIN

Monday

Feb 23, 2009 at 5:10 AM

A survey on Twitter and other microblogging sites shows that users of social networking services tend to cluster around age 25 and live in cities.

The Internet is rich with ways to broadcast one-sentence updates about yourself to your friends. The best known of these microblogging engines is Twitter, a service that lets people mass-mail short entries or “tweets” in real time from their phones or computers.

But Facebook also contains a similar feature called the “status update,” and a program called Yammer lets office workers post short updates about their activities.

Users of social networking services tend to cluster around age 25. But microblogging services “have plenty of users until about age 35,” said Amanda Lenhart, a researcher at the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which just released the results of a survey about microblogging.

The survey also found that microbloggers are more likely to live in cities than the average Internet user, and far less likely to live in rural areas: 9 percent live in rural areas, as compared to 17 percent of all Internet users. ALEX MINDLIN

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